Blow Out (Brian De Palma, 1981)

I've given this a miss for decades now, knowing that the overly-venerated hack De Palma was at the helm, and it seems to have been with good reason. He rips off his idol Hitchcock shamelessly yet again, besides taking the plot, with additions from Coppola's The Conversation, from Antonioni's Blow-Up, and the fact that the title blatantly acknowledges the debt does not make it an hommage to the latter.
John Travolta plays a sound engineer who witnesses the assassination of a presidential candidate and is then first persuaded by political forces to drop the matter, and then pursued by more sinister forces to the same end. It looks pretty, thanks to veteran cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, and that's about it. The progression of the story is hackneyed, the director's regular filmic tricks such as split focus over-used, the soundtrack dreadful in its lack of appropriacy and cheesiness and the female co-lead, who Travolta tries to protect, too stupid to live. That critics like Roger Ebert have elevated this to the pinnacles of perfection tells you everything you need to know to distrust anything they ever say too.

4/10